Eric Tepe
University of Cincinnati, OH·Plant Science & Agriculture
Pressed and dried plant specimens are the physical record of what grew where and when, going back two centuries, and they remain the reference material for identifying species and tracking how floras change. That record is only useful if the specimens survive and if researchers can actually reach them.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
herbarium
natural history collections
vascular plants
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Relocate the roughly 118,500-specimen Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium into a renovated facility with a compactor system and modern cabinets, replacing storage damaged by repeated water leaks and flooding.
- Curate, image, and database about 12,000 moss and liverwort specimens collected by bryophyte specialists Margaret Fulford and Jerry Snider, including material previously held on open shelves and inaccessible to researchers.
- Publish specimen records and images through the herbarium databases and the national biodiversity portal iDigBio.org so researchers and the public can access them remotely.
- Scan Margaret Fulford's approximately 3,500 original, largely unpublished technical botanical illustrations and make them available through public online portals.
- Continue two education programs around the collection: a collaborative specimen imaging project with developmentally disabled students and a local 5th-8th grade STEM Girls program.
More about the research
The Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium holds roughly 118,500 specimens collected from the 1820s through 2021, covering the regional vascular flora and including a major collection of mosses and liverworts, plus Dr. Fulford's personal library with rare volumes, unpublished field and laboratory notebooks, and more than 100 binders of original, mostly unpublished technical illustrations.
Why it matters
Herbarium specimens document which plants grew where over the past two centuries, information that cannot be recreated once specimens are lost to flooding, mold, or insects. Secure storage protects a regionally important vascular plant collection and a significant moss and liverwort collection, while imaging and databasing let botanists and the public anywhere consult the specimens and a large body of previously unpublished botanical illustrations online.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erin Manzitto-Tripp
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize 3 million Asian vascular plant specimens from US herbaria, with a focus on Southeast Asian and Himalaya-Hengduan biodiversity hotspots.
Timothy Judd
Southeast Missouri State University, MO·Ecology & Evolution
Digitize label data from bee specimens in US insect collections into a shared global database, aiming for at least 350,000 specimen records and 6,600 high-resolution image sets.
Brian Scholtens
College of Charleston, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Photograph and database all ~30,000 specimens in the Richard Dominick Lepidoptera collection from South Carolina's Santee Delta, collected 1965–1976, and make the data publicly available.
The school
University of Cincinnati: 18 labs on PI Pages, $740M a year on research, 275 research doctorates a year.
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